Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity JEFFREY C, ALEXANDER RON EYERMAN RERNHARD GIESEN NEIL J, SMELSER PIOTR SZTOMPKA UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley » Los Angeles ~ LondonAn carlie version of Chapter 6, Jefrey Alowance, "Op the Socal Constrsron of Meral Usners's “The Holocaus from War Crime to Trauma Dims,” ginal appeared in Earopecn Journal of Socal Teor Repel by emis of Sage Pans, Universy of California Press Bekele, Calor Univesity of Cfo Press, Lad London, Engl (© 2004 bythe Regants ofthe University of Caen Libary of Congress Cataloging ix Publiaon Data Clr treme and ellesve density Jel C. Alezander [etal ca Incloes biographical celerenes and inex ssp e-s2e235840 [lk paper —isiv0-320-25595-9 (p= alk. paper) 1 Soil probiems Peycholoiel aspects 1 Piychc aus Sia aepcts 3. Cries— Prycologcalaspes, 1 Alesande,Jfiey 5.6845 2004 ser1—deer soosera7és, Manat in the Unive Sere of Amica By is aE 109 08 oy 08 of OF wos Ss 45 at ‘Tho paper sed inthis pubction both aci-reand ‘orally clotne te (ror, fees the inioun ‘aguirement of ANSIISISO 23948-1993 (8 (997) Permanence of Paper. ® : i i f 5 | on oo . The Trauma of Social Chan; al eo" Contents Preface vii . Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma 2 JEFFREY C. ALEXANDER . Psychological Trauma and Caltural Trauma 3 NEIL J. SMELSER ‘Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity 60 RON EYERMAN The ‘Trauma of Perpetrators: The Holocaust me as the Traumatic Reference of German National Identity BERNHARD GLESEN A Case of Pastcommunist Societies ass PIOTR S2TOMPKA »- On the Social Construction of Moral Universals: ‘The “Holocaust” from War Crime to Trauma Drama 196 JEFFREY C, ALEXANDER Epilogue: September r1, 200r, as Cultural ‘Trauma 264 NEIL J. SMELSER Bibliography 283 Index 299CHAPTER ¥ Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma JEFFREY C. ALEXANDER Cultural trauma occurs when members of a collectivity feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness, marking their memories forever and changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways. 4s we develop it here, cultural trauma is first of all an empirical, sci- entific concept, suggesting new meaningful and causal relationships between previously unrelared events, structures, perceptions, and actions, But this new scientific concept alo illuminates an emerging domain of social responsibility and political action. It is by constructing cultural ‘traumas that social groups, national societies, and sometimes even entire civilizations not only cognitively identify the existence and source of human suffering but “take on board” some significant responsibility for it. Insofar as they identify the caute of trauma, and thereby assume such moral responsibility, members of collectvities define their solidary rela- tionships in ways that, in principle, allow them to share the sufferings of others, Is the suffering of others also our own? In thinking that it might in fact be, societies expand the circle of the we. By the same token, social groups can, and often do, refuse to recognize the existence of others? trauma, and because of their failure they cannot achieve a moral stance. By denying the realty of others’ suffering, people not only diffuse their ‘own responsibility for the suffering bur often project the responsibility for their own suffering on these others. In other words, by refusing to participate in what I will descrite as the process of trauma creation, social groups restrict solidarity, leaving others to suffer alone.a Jeffrey C. Alexander ORDINARY LANGUAGE AND REFLEXIVITY One of the great advantages of this new theoretical concept is that it par- takes so deeply of everyday life. Throughout the twentieth century, fist in Western societies and then, soon aftes, throughout the rest of the world, people have spoken continually about being traumatized by an experience, by an event, by an act of violence or harassment, or even, simply, by an abrupt and unexpected, and sometimes not even particu- larly malevolent, experience of social transformation and change.! People also have continually employed tke language of trauma to explain what happens, not only t0 themselves, but to the collectivities to which they belong as well. We often speak of an organization being traumatized when a leader departs or dies, when a governing regime falls, when an organization suffers an unexpected reversal of fortune. Actors describe themselves as traumatized when the environment of an individual or a collectivity suddenty shifts in an unforeseen and unwelcome manner. ‘We know from ordinary language, in other words, that we are onto something widely experienced and intuitively understood. Such rooted- ness in the life-world is the soil that nourishes every social scientific con: cept. The trick is to gain reflexivity, to move from the sense of something, commonly experienced to the sense of strangeness that allows us to think sociologically. For trauma is not something naturally existing; it is some thing constructed by society. Iti this construction that the coauthors of this volume have set themselves the task of trying to understand. In this task of making trauma strange, its embeddedness in everyday life and language, so important for providing an initial intuitive under- standing, now presents itself as 1 challenge co be overcome, We have come to believe, in fact, that the scholarly approaches to trauma devel oped thus far actually have been distorted by the powerful, common- sense understandings of trauma that have emerged in everyday life. Indeed, it might be said that these commonsense understandings consti- ture a kind of “lay trauma theory” in contrast to which a more theoreti- cally reflexive approach to trauma must be erected. Lay Travona Theory According to lay theory traumas are naturally occurring events that shat~ ter an individual or collective actor’s sense of well-being. In other words, the power to shatter—the “trauma”—is thought to emerge from events themselves. The reaction to such shattering events—“being trauma- ne ‘Toward a Theory of Cultural Traema 3 tized” —is felt and thought to be an immediate and unreflexive response. According to the lay perspective, the trauma experience occurs when the ‘traumatizing event interacts with human nature. Human beings need security, order, love, and connection. If something happens that sharply undermines these needs, it hardly seems surprising, according to the lay theory, that people will be traumatized as a result? Enlightenment Thinking ‘There ace “enlightenment” and “psychoanalytic” versions of this lay trauma theory. The enlightenment understanding suggests that trauma is a kind of rational response to abrupt change, whether at the individual or social level. The objects or events that trigger trauma are perceived clearly by actors, their responses are lucid, and the effects of these responses are problem solving and progressive. When bad things happen to good people, they become shocked, outraged, indignant. From an enlightenment perspective, it seems obvious, pethaps even unremark- able, that political scandals are cause for indignation; that economic depressions are cause for despair; that lost wars create a sense of anger and aimlessness; that disasters in the physical environment lead to panics that assaults on the human body lead to intense anxiety; that technolog ical disasters create concerns, even phobias, about risk. The responses t0 such traumas will be efforts to alter the circumstances that caused them. ‘Memories about the past guide this thinking about the future. Programs for action will be developed, individual and collective environments will be reconstructed, and eventual the feelings of tranma will subside, This enlightenment version of lay trauma theory has recently been exemplified by Arthur Neal -n his National Trauma and Collective Memory. In explaining whether or not a collectivity is traumatized, Neal points to the quality of the evext itself. National traumas have been cxe- ated, he argues, by "individual and collective reactions to a voleano-like event that shook the foundations of the social world” (Neal 1998, ix). An event traumatizes a collectivity because itis “an extraordinary event,” an event that has such “an explosive quality” thar it creates “disruption” and “radical change ,.. within a shore period of time” (Neal 1998, 3, 9-10). These objective empirical qualities “command the attention of all major subgroups of the population,” triggering emotional response and public attention because rational people simply cannot react in any other way (Neal 1998, 9-10). “Dismissing or ignoring the traumatic experience is not a reasonable option,” nor & “holding an attitude of benign neglect”‘ Jeffrey C. Alexander ‘or “cynical indifference” (Neal 1998, 4, 9-10). It is precisely because actors are reasonable that traumatic events typically lead to progress: “The very fact that a disruptive event has occurced” means that “new ‘opportunities cmerge for innovation and change” (Neal 1998, 18). It is hardly surprising, in other words, that “permanent changes were intro- duced into the [American] nation as a result of the Civil Was, the Great Depression, and the tranma of Work! War II” (Neal r998, 5). Despite what I will later call the naturalistic limitations of such an Enlightenment understanding of traama, what remains singularly impor- tant about Neal’ approach is its emphasis on the collectivity rather than the individual, an emphasis that sets it apart from the more individually oriented psychoanalytically informed approaches discussed below, In focusing on events that create trauma for national, not individual, iden- tity, Neal follows the path- breaking sociological model developed by Kai Erikson in his widely influential book Everythong am tts Path, While this heart-wrenching account of the effects on a small Appalachian commu- nity of a devastating flood is likewise constrained by a naturalistic per- spective, it established the groundwork for the distinctively sociological approach we adopt in this volume. Erikson’s theoretical innovation was to conceptualize the difference becw2en collective and individual trauma. Both the attention to collectively emergent properties ancl the naturalism ‘with which such collective traumas are conceived are evident in the fol- owing passage. By individual trauma I mean 2 bfow to the payche that breaks through one’s defenses so suddenly and with such brutal force that one cannot react 10 it fective ... By collective trauma, on the other hand, I mean a blow to the basic tissues of social life that damages the bonds attaching people together «and impairs the prevailing sense of commupality. The collective trauma ‘works its way slowly and even insidisusly into the awareness of those who suffer from it, so it does not have the quality of suddenness normally associ= ated with “trauma.” But iti a form of shock all the same, a gradual reali ‘ion that the community no longer exists as an effective source of support and that a important part of the self has disappeared ... “We” no longer exist asa connected pair or as linked cells ina larger commnal boxy. (Erikson 1976, «53-54, italics addec) [As Smelser suggests in chapter 2, following, lay eeauma theory began to enter ordinary language and scholarly discussions alike in the efforts to understand the kind of “shell shock” that affected so many soldiers due ing World War I, and it became expanded and elaborated in relation to other wars that followed in the course of che twentieth century. When eases Tovrard a Theory of Cultural Trauma 5 Glen Elder created “life course analysis” to trace the cohort effects on individual identity of these and other cataclysmic social events in the twentieth century, he and his students adopted a similar enlightenment mode of trauma (Elder 1974). Similar understandings have long in- formed approaches in other disciplines, for example, the vast historiog- raphy devoted to the far-reaching effects on nineteenth-century Europe and the United States of the “trauma” of the French Revolution. Ele- ments of the lay enlightenment 2crspective have also informed contem- porary thinking about the Holocaust and responses to other episodes of mass murder in the twentieth century, as Eyerman and I suggest in out respective discussions of “progressive narratives” in this volume. Psychoanalytic Thinking Such realist thinking continues to permeate everyday life and scholarly thought alike. Increasingly, however, it has come to be filtered through a psychoanalytic perspective that ras become central to both contempo- rary lay common sense and academic thinking, This approach places a model of unconscious emotional fears and cognitively distorting mecha- hisms of psychological defense between the external shattering event and the actor’s internal traumatic resconse. When bad things happen to good people, according to this academis version of lay theory, they can become so frightened that they can actually repress the experience of trauma itself. Rather than activating direct cognition and rational understanding, the traumatizing event becomes cistorted in the actor’s imagination and memory. The effort to accurately attribute responsibility for the event and the progressive effort ro develop an ameliorating response are under- mined by displacement. This psichoanalytically mediated perspective ‘continues to maintain a naturalistic approach to traumatic events, but it suggests a more complex undersanding about the human ability con- sciously to perceive them. The trath about the experience is perceived, but only unconsciously, In effect, ruth goes underground, and accusate memory and responsible action zre its victims. Traumatic feelings and perceptions, then, come not only from the originating event but from the anxiety of keeping it repressed. Trauma will be resolved, not only by set- ting things right in the world, but by setting things right in the self According to this perspective, the turh can be recovered, and psycho- logical equanimity restored, only, as the Holocaust historian Saul Friedlander once put it, “when memory comes.” ‘This phrase actually provides tne title of Friedlander’s memoir about6 Jelirey C. Alexander his childhood during the Holocaust years in Germany and France. Recounting, in evocative literary language, his earlier experiences of per- secution and displacement, Friedlander suggests that conscious percep- tion of highly traumatic events can emerge only after psychological intro- spection and “working through” allows actors to recover their full capacities for agency (Freidlander 1979, 1992). Emblematic ofthe intel- lectual framework that has emerged over the last three decades in response to the Holocaust experience, this psychoanalytically informed theorizing particularly illuminated the role of collective memory, insisting oon the importance of working backward through the symbolic residues that the originating event has left upon contemporary recollection.* Much as these memory residues surface through free association in psychoanalytic treatment, they appear in public life theough the creation of literature. It should not be surprising, then, that literary interpretation, ‘with its hermeneutic approach to symbolic patterns, has been ottered a5 a kind of academic counterpart to the psychoanalytic intervention, In fact, the major theoretical and empirical statements of the psychoanalytic version of lay trauma theory have been produced by scholars in the var ious disciplines of the humanities. Because within the psychoanalytic tra- dition ithas been Lacan who has emphasized the importance of language in emotional formation, it has been Lacanian theory, often in combina- tion with Derridean deconstruction, that has informed these humanities based studies of trauma. Pechaps the most influential scholar in shaping this approach has been Cathy Cacuth, in her own collection of essays, Unclaimed Experience: ‘Trauma, Narrative, and History and in her edited collection, Trausna: Explorations in Memory (Caruth 3995, 1996).$ Caruth focuses on the complex permutations that unconscious emotions impose on traumatic reactions, and her approach has cerainly been helpful in our own think ing about cultural trauma. In keeping with the psychoanalytic tradition, however, Caruth roots her analysis in the power and objectivity of the originating traumatic event, explaining that “Freud's intuition of, and his passionate fascination with, traurratic experiences” related traumatic reactions to “the unwitting reenactrient of an event that one cannot sim- ply leave behind” (Caruth r99s, ). The event cannot be left behind because “the breach in the mind’s experience,” according to Caruth, “is experienced t00 soon.” ‘This abruptness prevents the mind from fully cognizing the event. It is experienc:d “too unexpectedly... to be fully mown and is therefore not available to consciousness.” Buried in the Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma unconscious, the event is experienced irrationally, “in the nightmares and repetitive actions of the survivor.” This shows how the psychoana- Iytic version of lay trauma thecry goes beyond the Enlightenment one: “Trauma is not locatable in th: simple violent or original event in an individual's past, but rather in the way its very unassimilated nature— the way it was precisely not known in the first instance—returns to haunt the survivor later on.” When Caruth describes these traumatic symptoms, however, she retutns to the theme of objectivity, suggesting thar they “tell us of a realty or truth that is not otherwise available” (Caruth 1995, 34, italics added), “The enormous influence of this psychoanalytic version of lay trauma theory can be seen in the manner in which it has informed the recent efforts by Latin American scholars to come to terms with the traumatic brutalities of their recent dictatorships. Many of these discussions, of course, are purely empincal mvestigations of the extent of repression and/or normative arguments that assign responsibilities and demand reparations. Yet there is an increasing body of literature that addresses the effects of the repression in terms of the traumas it caused. ‘The aim is to restore collective psychological health by lifting societal repression and restoring memory. To achieve this, social scientists stress the importance of finding—through public acts of commemoration, cul tural representation, and public political struggle—some collective means for undoing repression and allowing the pent-up emotions of loss and mourning to be expressed. While thoroughly laudable in moral terms, and without doubt also very helpfal in terms of promoting public discourse and enhancing self-esteem, this advocacy literature typically is limited by the constraints of lay common sense. The traumatized feetings of the vietims, and the actions that should be taken in response, are both treated as the unmediated, commonsense reactions to the repression itself. Elizabeth Jelin and Susan Kaufman, for example, directed a large- scale project on “Memory and Narrativity” sponsored by the Ford Foundation, involving a team of investigators from different South ‘American countries. In their powerful report on their initial findings, “Layers of Memories: Twenty Years After in Argentina,”® they contrast the victims insistence on recognizing the reality of traumatizing, events and experiences with the denial of the perpetrators and their conserva- five supporters, denials that insist on looking to the fucure and forgetting. the past: “The confrontation is between the voices of those who cal for commemoration, for remembrance of the disappearances and the tor-